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Significantly, and surely not coincidentally . . . the political movement to establish woman as, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s words, “the arbiter of her own destiny,” was contemporaneous with a period of repressive codification of femininity, which culminated in Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the neurasthenic and hysterical disturbances in women that were, in part, somatized symptoms of rebellion against encasement in the golden cage of Victorian hyperfemininity.

At the same time, such writers as Baudelaire set major tropes of modernism within the interlinked codes and persona of femininity and commodity culture: the importance of fashion and the ephemeral, the spaces of modernity as night worlds of commodification of female sexuality that excluded the bourgeois and upper-class woman, including the woman artist, while focusing on the female as whore and emblem of death wrapped in gauzy finery.

The institution of such codes of femininity vested in patriarchal interests raises questions of complicity with them on the part of any woman artist. Griselda Pollock writes:

In approaching works by Cassatt and Morisot, we can ask: Are they complicit with the dominant regime? Do they naturalize femininity in its major premises? Is femininity confirmed as passivity and masochistic or is there a critical look resulting from a different position from which femininity is appraised, experienced, and represented?

. . . While there is no specific evidence in Cassatt’s letters that she took a vocal position on suffrage, one may safely assume that women’s rights would have been a subject of great import and discussion in her social circle and part of her basic self-awareness. There are differing views on the extent to which Cassatt’s access to the public world was restricted by the concerns for proprieties that generally limited the movements and nondomestic ambitions of women of her class. Despite rigidly codified boundaries, some women had greater freedom of movement and exploration than our contemporary imagination might entertain.

—Mira Schor

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